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Google Play Gets Interactive

January 11, 2013

By Jody Ray Bennett, TMCnet Contributing Writer

Anyone familiar with the online review and assessment site, Yelp (News - Alert).com, knows quite well how the platform works. Users give businesses, like restaurants and cafes, positive or negative reviews based on their experience.

Sometimes businesses reply, defending their actions, often going as far as to apologize for a cranky server or bland food.

Yelp.com not only provides users with customer reviews on a variety of services in user locale, but also for businesses to advertise its product or service and interact with customers after an experience.

Google (News - Alert) Play’s Play Store has done the same thing. Now, developers will be able to communicate on the message and comment boards found just below an app’s description and review.

According to reports, “This is both a good and bad thing. For one developers will now be able to respond directly to claims and comments on their apps, as well as help out all those 1-star votes that shouldn’t be there. On the flip side, we can see people purposely leaving 1-star reviews to get a quicker reply from the developer team. At least now users will be cautious since their review is tied to their Google+ account.”

Nevertheless, Google Play’s Play Store is hoping to make the comment arena more democratic. Users will be able to hear back from developers on a wide array of issues of concern to them, and developers can make targeted responses to users concerning things like bugs, version updates, things that are in the works, and other information.

This is just one of the many changes Google is making to its Play store. Aside from this developer interaction feature, Google is also changing the app store’s font to a cleaner and more readable style. Further, there will be additions to developer ability to add screenshots and a variety of other media to their app corner, while users should expect an easier browsing and purchasing regime.

Google has even looked into developing its app store to be searchable by television, though this is far from coming to fruition.